Information Management of British Military Intelligence: The Work of the Documentalists, 1909–1945 Rodney M. Brunt Abstract After describing briefly the activities of information officers in the early decades of British security services MI5 and the Secret Intel- ligence Service (SIS, otherwise known as MI6), the work of these documentalists is thereafter explored in the wider context of the information manager in the knowledge organization. Early in the twentieth century, MI5 created its Registry to ensure the efficient use of the information it gathered on suspect aliens. Its equivalent in SIS, housed in Room 40 Admiralty Old Building, was concerned with signals intercepted first on cables and later transmitted by wireless. The Second World War saw similar operations, including those of the London Reception Centre (LRC) and of the Government Code & Cypher School (GCCS) in Bletchley Park. This paper describes briefly the means by which the intelligence could be put to efficient use to provide effective and efficient support to their customers, the “spycatchers,” “the watch,” and the researchers, or “back room.” Introduction While British military history can supply us with many illustrations of the role that intelligence might play in both strategic and operational deci- sion making, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that there was a formalization of this aspect of military planning and resources. The War Office established its Intelligence Branch in 1873; but it was not until 1887 that the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) emerged as a major organization in the military establishment (Herman, 1996, p. 17). The documentation of intelligence, of course, has a long history. In more recent times we find, for instance, that one of the participants in the sec- ond annual meeting of the Library Association of the United Kingdom, Manchester, September, 1879, was Captain George Grover of the Intelli- LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 62, No. 2, 2013 (“Essays in Honor of W. Boyd Rayward: Part I,” edited by Alistair Black and Charles van den Heuvel), pp. 360–377. © 2014 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois british military intelligence/brunt 361 gence Department, War Office (Tedder and Thomas, 1880, p. 159). Later the intelligence services, both internal and external, were to undergo massive expansion, and with that expansion came the need for manage- ment, not only in organizational terms but also of the raw materials. In- telligence, of course, means information; and what emerged from the pe- riod just preceding the First World War was the application of various information management techniques to control the vast amounts of the raw material generated as a result of the formalization of the intelligence gathering process. Information management needs information manag- ers and, while the term was to take some time in its coining, these manag- ers were among the forerunners of the information officers of today. This paper explores the functions and activities of the information managers, or documentalists, of the British security services MI5 and the Secret In- telligence Service (SIS, otherwise known as MI6) in the wider context of the information officer in the knowledge organization of the first half of the twentieth century.1 Background The history of the establishment of the British intelligence services is now well documented (West, 1981; West, 1986; Andrew, 2009: Jeffery, 2010) and the exploits of the different sections and departments in counter espi- onage and information gathering and analysis have been extensively cov- ered over the past twenty years or so. What have been less fully explored are the information management aspects of their operations, which were concerned with the organization and retrieval of the intelligence gath- ered by techniques ranging from stealing documents, to eavesdropping on conversation (human intelligence, often contracted to HUMINT), to in- tercepting wireless signals (signals intelligence, often contracted to SIGINT). In keeping with their functions, these organizations accumulated pro- digious quantities of intelligence from a wide range of sources—informa- tion that could be controlled and made useful only by means of informa- tion management techniques such as indexing. In their introduction to Codebreakers, Hinsley and Stripp (1993, p. 12) observe that Ultra short- ened the Second World War by two years.2 It would perhaps be more accu- rate (and just) to say that it was the documentation of the intelligence that was responsible for that shortening, for pure intelligence out of context and unrelated is valueless. Three establishments—the Central Registry of MI5, the Information Section of the London Reception Centre (LRC), and the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS)—provide useful exemplars.3 The Central Registry of MI5 was set up soon after the bureau was first established in 1909. Part of its brief was to ensure that “all Names, Places, and Subjects mentioned in the documents should be minutely indexed”4 to allow action to be “based on a knowledge of all the available facts, a knowledge which is to be obtained by consulting all relevant documents.”5 362 library trends/fall 2013 By the end of the First World War, a highly efficient and well-organized machine had been created under Captain Vernon Kell, the army inter- preter and bureaucrat who had directed MI5 since its inception; and the potential for continuing development on the basis of lessons learned was considerable. However, improvements recommended in the historical reports were not introduced; rather, the War Office allowed the Regis- try to become moribund, starved of status and resources. It is hardly sur- prising that under the pressure of renewed hostilities in 1939, the system crashed. According to the official internal history of the Security Service,6 the Central Index “had been allowed to lapse into a lamentable state,” a degeneration which included misplaced cards, a great lack of guide cards, and overfull cabinets. The necessary reorganization of MI5’s information commenced in July 1940 when Reginald Horrocks, a specialist in business methods, was recruited from Roneo (but, it appears, no indexers, librari- ans, or documentalists). Opportunity was taken to work on the document files and the index, weeding, consolidating, and improving consistency. By end of the war, the very much more efficient Registry incorporated an index of over one and a quarter million entries. The London Reception Centre (LRC) had been opened to handle large numbers of alien refugees flooding into Britain from occupied Eu- rope. To facilitate confirmation of theirbona fides, in 1942 the Centre’s Information Section established its Information Index, which came to contain a great variety of relevant material about the countries from which they arrived along with details of methods and routes used by enemy agents or members of allied resistance movements. The Index was in two sepa- rate parts: the Name Index and the Geographical Index, and eventually contained some 100,000 cards.7 The LRC Information Section and par- ticularly the Information Index were the only point at which information from MI5, SIS, and Special Operations Executive (SOE) and numerous other sources was recorded and collated for the benefit of MI5. As a result other organizations also made use of it, such as MI5 head office sections, SOE, and Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). Soon after the establishment of GCCS at Bletchley Park, it became plain that arrangements would have to be put in place to exploit fully the intelligence it was obtaining from breaking Enigma.8 The lead was taken by Winterbotham (chief air intelligence officer of SIS), Welchman (a mathematician in Trinity College, Cambridge, recruited on the eve of war to reinforce the decrypting resources), Travis (deputy head of GCCS), and others who together quickly came to appreciate the need to record and index the information (Welchman, 1982, pp. 93–94). Unlike intelligence gathered from more conventional sources such as observation and captured documents, which might be said to have a degree of context into which the information might be placed, SIGINT arrived as disembodied strings of letters. Very often the decrypts, while british military intelligence/brunt 363 having the appearance of being clear messages in a recognizable lan- guage, turned out to be constructed from jargon and contractions, and were highly specific to the knowledge and experience of the sender and intended recipient(s). Unless these nonconversational German messages could be clarified, their sharing with allied commanders in the field could range in effect from useless to dangerous. To this end, various recording and documentation facilities were es- tablished by the units that were directly involved in the exploitation of decrypted signals. Of these the principal units were Air Intelligence (3A), Military Intelligence (3M), and General Intelligence (3G), all located in Hut 3; and Naval Intelligence located in Hut 4.9 The documentation of the intelligence effectively took two forms: factual indexes that recorded details relating to specific topics (such as military equipment, locations, formations) and individuals; and reference indexes that could be used to translate, clarify, explain, and conceptualize words, abbreviations, ac- ronyms, and arbitrary strings of characters, that emerged in the decrypts (Brunt, 2004). In addition were to be found indexes maintained by specialist research